This invention relates to vascular repair devices, and in particular intravascular stents, which are adapted to be implanted into a patient's body lumen, such as a blood vessel or coronary artery, to maintain the patency thereof. Stents are particularly useful in the treatment of atherosclerotic stenosis in arteries and blood vessels. More particularly, the invention concerns an intravascular device having a prefabricated, patterned mesh stent cover that helps to prevent the formation and release of embolic debris in the body lumen and is capable of eluting therapeutic drugs with uniform and controlled drug distribution at the treatment site while providing the intravascular device with a uniform patterned biocompatible and/or hemocompatible surface.
An intravascular interventional device such as a stent is particularly useful in the treatment and repair of blood vessels after a stenosis has been treated by percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA), or removed by atherectomy or other means, to help improve the results of the procedure and reduce the possibility of restenosis. Stents also can be used to provide primary compression to a stenosis in cases in which no initial PTCA or PTA procedure is performed. While stents are most often used in the procedures mentioned above, they also can be implanted in any body lumen or vessel such as the urethra, esophagus and bile duct and the like.
In typical PTCA procedures, a guiding catheter or sheath is percutaneously introduced into the cardiovascular system of a patient through the femoral arteries and advanced through the vasculature until the distal end of the guiding catheter is in the aorta. A guide wire and a dilatation catheter having a balloon on the distal end are introduced through the guiding catheter with the guide wire sliding within the dilatation catheter. The guide wire is first advanced out of the guiding catheter into the patient's vasculature and is directed across the arterial lesion. The dilatation catheter is subsequently advanced over the previously advanced guide wire until the dilatation balloon is properly positioned across the arterial lesion. Once in position across the lesion, the expandable balloon is inflated to a predetermined size with a radiopaque liquid at relatively high pressure to press the atherosclerotic plaque of the lesion against the inside of the artery wall and thereby dilate the lumen of the artery. The balloon is then deflated to a small profile so that the dilatation catheter can be withdrawn from the patient's vasculature and the blood flow resumed through the dilated artery. As should be appreciated by those skilled in the art, while the above-described procedure is typical, it is not the only method used in angioplasty. In angioplasty procedures of the kind referenced above, abrupt reclosure may occur or restenosis of the artery may develop over time, which may require another angioplasty procedure, a surgical bypass operation, or some other method of repairing or strengthening the area. To reduce the likelihood of the occurrence of abrupt reclosure and to strengthen the area, a physician can implant an intravascular prosthesis for maintaining vascular patency, commonly known as a stent, inside the artery across the lesion. Stents are generally cylindrically shaped devices which function to hold open and sometimes expand a segment of a blood vessel or other arterial lumen, such as coronary artery. Stents are usually delivered in a compressed condition to the target location and then are deployed into an expanded condition to support the vessel and help maintain it in an open position. The stent is usually crimped tightly onto a delivery catheter and transported in its delivery diameter through the patient's vasculature. The stent is expandable upon application of a controlled force, often through the inflation of the balloon portion of the delivery catheter, which expands the compressed stent to a larger diameter to be left in place within the artery at the target location. The stent also may be of the self-expanding type formed from, for example, shape memory metals or super-elastic nickeltitanum (NiTi) alloys, which will automatically expand from a compressed state when the stent is advanced out of the distal end of the delivery catheter into the body lumen.
Since it is often useful to provide localized therapeutic pharmacological treatment of a blood vessel at the location being treated with the stent, it is also desirable to provide stents with a biocompatible and/or hemocompatible surface coating of a polymeric material with the capability of being loaded with therapeutic agents, to function together with the intravascular devices for placement and release of the therapeutic drugs at a specific intravascular site. Drugs can also be loaded on a stent without using a polymer coat, for example, by chemical linkage. Drug-eluting stent devices have shown great promise in treating coronary artery disease, specifically in terms of reopening and restoring blood flow in arteries stenosed by atherosclerosis. Restenosis rates after using drug-eluting stents during percutaneous intervention are significantly lower compared to bare metal stenting and balloon angioplasty.
The above-described, non-surgical interventional procedures, when successful, avoid the necessity for major surgical operations. However, a danger which is always present during these procedures is the potential for particles of the atherosclerotic plaque, which can be extremely friable, breaking away from the arterial wall. For example, during deployment of a stent, the metal struts of the stent can possibly cut into the stenosis and shear off pieces of plaque which become embolic debris that will travel downstream and lodge somewhere in the patient's vascular system. When any of the above-described procedures are performed in the carotid arteries, the release of emboli into the circulatory system should be avoided. For example, debris that is carried by the bloodstream to distal vessels of the brain can cause these cerebral vessels to occlude, possibly resulting in a stroke. Therefore, although cerebral percutaneous transluminal angioplasty has been performed in the past, the number of procedures performed has been limited due to the fear of causing an embolic stroke should embolic debris enter the bloodstream and block vital downstream blood passages. Embolization in other vasculature may induce possible acute myocardial infraction when a procedure is performed on the coronary arteries and gangrene when performed in peripheral arteries, such as the arms and legs. In addition, current design and fabrication methods for drug-eluting stent devices are not optimal. Accordingly, various limitations exist with respect to such current design and fabrication methods for drug-eluting stents.
While stents are helpful in holding open otherwise blocked or occluded vessels, the stent does have an open structure which may include struts and spines which cooperatively provide the scaffolding necessary to maintain the vessel open at the site of treatment. Due to the open nature of the stent structure, there is a possibility that growth material can pass through the openings between the struts and extend into the inner lumen of the stent structure. For example, excessive cell or tissue growth (intimal hyperplasia) can cause partial restenosis to develop over time, which is detrimental to the patient. The tissue or cell growth can extend into the tubular opening created by the stent and can block or otherwise reocclude the opening and can possibly cause abnormal blood flow through the stent which can cause formation of thrombi that are detrimental to the patient's health.
Prior art devices have been created to help reduce the passage of such growth through the wall of the deployed stent, including a stent covering which surrounds the open stent. In this manner, the gaps between the stent struts can be covered to prevent material, such as plaque, from prolapsing between the struts. Coverings have included a variety of materials such as ePTFE, autologous vein grafts, pericardium and fibrin. The covering should be sufficiently flexible and expandable to allow the stent to deploy from its collapsed or compressed position to a fully expanded position.
Covered stents also help prevent the struts from cutting into the plaque of the stenosis which helps reduce the possibility of forming embolic debris that can be released into the blood stream, as described above. Moreover, in the event that any embolic debris may be created from the expansion of the stent, the covering could trap the embolic particles against the arterial wall, thus preventing the particles from being released into the bloodstream.
Some prior art covered stents are difficult to manufacture due to the flexibility of the covering and the requirement that the covering be capable of expansion when the stent is deployed within the patient's vasculature. For these reasons, the material used to form the covering may be subjected to intricate processing to obtain the desired flexibility for the covering and to attach the covering to the stent. A covering which does not expand normally can cause the stent to misalign within the body vessel and can cause an non-uniform deployment of the stent. Moreover, some coverings are made from a sheet of material which is rolled into a cylindrical shape by creating a longitudinal seam which runs along the length of the covering and then the covering is attached to the stent. Such coverings can be more susceptible to tearing, especially at the seam, when the stent is expanded.
Some prior art stents that are covered may have a tendency to shorten when expanded and the covered material also shortens, providing an undesirable result. As the stent and the covered material are expanded into contact with an artery or vessel wall, the shortening movement may scrape along the artery wall and cause injury or dislodge plaque material which may embolize. Further, as these prior art covered stents shorten upon expansion, the cover material shortens past the stent struts at the stent ends, leaving a covered stent with exposed stent struts, and not fully covered upon expansion.
Moreover, the addition of drug elution to the stent adds a whole new set of engineering challenges. Current design and fabrication methods for drug-eluting stent devices are not optimal. One limitation, for example, is that current drug eluting stent designs employ spray techniques in which a mixture of the drug in a polymer and/or solvent solution is spray coated on the entire stent surface with a primer, drug, and topcoat layers being used to control release kinetics. This approach tends to cause cracking in the drug-coating layer, since the layer also undergoes stretching during stent expansion, and a considerable amount of the drug is washed out into the blood stream, and only a fraction gets into the tissue/artery. Further, the amount of the drug that can be loaded on the stent is limited by mechanical properties of the coating, since a higher drug content in the polymer makes the coating more brittle and causes cracking thereto. Therefore, loading a higher drug dose requires coating with more polymer on the device. Moreover, the spray techniques require large spaces to avoid webbing and pooling. Special equipment for crimping the drug-eluting stent on the balloon and to securely attach the stent on the balloon is also needed in accordance with current fabrication methods. Often spray coatings may be damaged during the crimping processes. Stents designed for acute deliverability may not make the optimal elution vehicles.
What has been needed and heretofore unavailable is a novel design that decouples the two major functional characteristics of the drug-eluting stent device, namely the purely mechanical stent structure and the local drug-eluting component. Current devices are constrained by their design construct which necessitates optimizing both factors-mechanical stent expansion and drug-elution kinetics simultaneously. Thus, it would be desirable to have a stent structure that is optimally designed for expansion (i.e., allowable stress/strain, scaffolding, radial strength, etc.) independent of the drug-eluting component, and the drug-eluting component designed for local drug release independent of mechanical factors associated with stent expansion. The present invention meets these and other needs.